Renault Laguna III - 2.0dCI Sport Tourer Owner's Review - Number_Cruncher
>>That must be a sign of 'good engineering'
I'm normally disposed to defend engineers, but, in this case, there's no real excuse. Buckling failure is well understood, presented in most mechanics of materials textbooks, and easy to design against.
The only reasonable defence is if the strut had been previously bent or damaged by clumsy use which would make buckling happen at much lower loads.
Having said that, although it's not relevant in this particular case, a colleage did find a serious error in the British Standard for designing hydraulic cylinders against buckling which he documented and submitted to the standard committee.